In 1973, Kurt Vonnegut learned that Charles McCarthy, head of the
school board that governed Drake High School in North Dakota, had burned
32 copies of Slaughterhouse-Five in the school furnace,
offended by the book’s “obscene language.” Vonnegut wrote a private
letter to McCarthy, a heartfelt, low-key, scathing recrimination that
could be repurposed for any literary censor. The letter is reprinted in
Vonnegut’s Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage, I found it on Letters of Note.
I gather from what I read in the papers and hear on television that you
imagine me, and some other writers, too, as being sort of ratlike
people who enjoy making money from poisoning the minds of young people. I
am in fact a large, strong person, fifty-one years old, who did a lot
of farm work as a boy, who is good with tools. I have raised six
children, three my own and three adopted. They have all turned out well.
Two of them are farmers. I am a combat infantry veteran from World War
II, and hold a Purple Heart. I have earned whatever I own by hard work. I
have never been arrested or sued for anything. I am so much trusted
with young people and by young people that I have served on the
faculties of the University of Iowa, Harvard, and the City College of
New York. Every year I receive at least a dozen invitations to be
commencement speaker at colleges and high schools. My books are probably
more widely used in schools than those of any other living American
fiction writer.
If you were to bother to read my books, to
behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not
sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that
people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true
that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak
coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak
coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that. And we all
know, too, that those words really don’t damage children much. They
didn’t damage us when we were young. It was evil deeds and lying that
hurt us.
After I have said all this, I am sure you are still
ready to respond, in effect, “Yes, yes–but it still remains our right
and our responsibility to decide what books our children are going to be
made to read in our community.” This is surely so. But it is also true
that if you exercise that right and fulfill that responsibility in an
ignorant, harsh, un-American manner, then people are entitled to call
you bad citizens and fools. Even your own children are entitled to call
you that.
